


The Colour of Whiskey Changes With the Light

by elephant_eyelash



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Non-Canon Relationship, Out of Character, Pregnancy, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-27
Updated: 2012-02-27
Packaged: 2017-10-31 19:11:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/347444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elephant_eyelash/pseuds/elephant_eyelash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU: Sybil and Matthew in a moment of weakness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Colour of Whiskey Changes With the Light

As a boy he used to dream of Mars.

A shy boy, he had spent summers lost in Wells and Verne dreaming of aliens who had just as much trouble in school as he, or found it as awkward to talk around girls. Maybe they had his long, awkward limbs that seemed to jut out at every angle. It was not the scientist he used to long to be (though he did rather like that they had pretty female assistants and lovely, long moustaches) but the noble savage from Venus with translucent skin.

Then he grew up and stopped reading novels. Lawyers read Hardy, not Wells. Yet the fictional landscape of the brooding Wessex countryside never held quite the same sense of wonder and the caverns of Venus glittering with jewels.

When Lavinia died he found himself thinking of his boyhood again. She would have been an assistant to a famous astronomer, so sweet and compliant was she to be in the shadows of everything. The adventures they would have had. It hurt too much to think of them in some Austen-inspired domestic bliss, so instead he saw them in fantastical worlds of his own imagination.

After he death he learnt too that the colour of whiskey changes with the light. Music becomes blurrier as well, too, as if it is not sound at all. He drifted through life, half-drunk half-clean half-sane half-himself with her ghost beside him. Too ill to go to Mary’s wedding, he spent the day instead drinking and watching the rain.

Then she arrived. Dublin smelt too thickly of sulphur and iron cast off bullets nowadays for her and her swollen belly. Stubbornly she had followed her husband’s wishes. And so she became like him the outsider. They had tasted the outside world in all its ugliness.

He had sometimes considered how much easier his life would have been if he had fallen in love with Sybil. To fall in raptures at her soft, unassuming beauty rather than the harsh sensuality of her sister. How kind she was to everyone. How readily she would have accepted his proposal on the basis of love and love alone.

She began to accompany him, the two gravitating together in their Otherness. She listened to him as she clumsily knitted baby clothes. She kindly ignored the scent of alcohol on his breath. His days began to centre on her company. Lonely seek the lonely, always. She missed her husband so bitterly, worried so much as she scanned the newspaper at breakfast and clutched her stomach so protectively.

Maybe it was love. But it didn’t feel like a good, clean sort of love: more like him desperately clinging onto her, her goodness.

“Matthew…” She said one day. “Are you quite all right?”

He broke down crying. And she held him, and her skin smelt of jasmine and felt like butter underneath his cheek. So he grabbed her and kissed her, crying still, until the sting of her slap awoke him from his stupor.

“Matthew!” She gasped, and at once things stopped being some sad poem ripped from a book somewhere; this was real, she was real, he was real, and it hurt. It all hurt so much.

Lavinia is dead.

Lavinia  
is  
dead

She  
died of a b r o k e n heart

b  
r ok  
en

(Shards of glass, a railway hotel room months ago, a pill bottle by his side. He woke up, unsure if he was living or dead).

He fell into Sybil’s lap, drunk, crying. She placed her hand on the side of his head and started stroking his hair like a Mother would do a child.

“I’m so sorry.” He said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s quite all right.” She said. “Quite all right.”

“I do so wish I had loved you as much as I love Mary.”

“Matthew…”

He choked out another sob.

“We would’ve been together by now, married, children…”

“You’re supposing I’ve ever loved you, Matthew.” Sybil said sharply, bringing his head up to face hers’.

“But do you not think…” He swallowed. “In another time, another place…?”

“Oh Matthew, one can say that about anything!” She exclaimed.

“But I can see that world now.” He said, grabbing her hand.

“My world is with him.” She tilted her head. “It always has been.” She paused. “You’ll see, in time, that it isn’t love you feel for me.”

“Then what is it?” He cried.

“You know what I see when I look into your eyes?”

He shook his head.

“A most terrible sadness.” She said. “You loved someone and you lost them.”

“I have lost both of them.” He said. “Though Mary was never really mine.”

“Mary will never be anyone’s. Not completely.” Sybil said.

He paused for a moment and considered her words, that devastatingly simple summary of Mary; Mary with her cupid’s bow mouth and that bird-song laugh; and how true it was. How right Sybil was about so many things, sat there with child and that glow from the lamp casting a halo around her temple. He wanted her all over again, wanted that contentment that seemed to radiate from her lips, her skin, her breasts. It was a half-feeling, but a feeling nonetheless.

“He’s a lucky man, Tom.” He murmured, trying to smile a little.

She rubbed her belly.

“And once you— I mean the real you is back again.” She said quietly. “Mary will be lucky too.”


End file.
